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An
Anatomy of Multiculturalism
The
current debate over the canon is growing polarized between defense
of tradition against "barbaric" innovations, and defense
of change against the "tyranny" of received wisdom. At
the risk of making both sides unhappy, the dean of Yale College
argues for a more nuanced approach.
April
1994
by Richard Brodhead
Richard
Brodhead, Dean of Yale College, is the A. Bartlett Giamatti Professor
of English.
There
once was a time when literate culture—the things educated people
know and believe other people should know—possessed certain well-marked
features. The
contents of literate culture were internally coherent; they were
widely agreed to; and above all they were agreed to be universal
in their interest or meaning. What happened in education, according
to this understanding, was that we came out of whatever local, parochial
origin we happened to have been born in to meet on the ground of
the universally significant. In literature, we studied the work
not of those who expressed themselves "like us," but of
writers who transcended such limits of time and place—writers with
names like Homer and Shakespeare. In philosophy we read not those
who thought the way people think where we came from, but thinkers
of perennial, transcultural significance: Plato, for instance, or
Rousseau.
A current caricature
says that this model of education was only ever subscribed to by
the elite, but historically this is quite untrue. During its long
reign the concept of universal culture was often valued especially
highly by outsiders. When W. E. B. DuBois, the great African American
intellectual of the turn of the last century, looked for an image
of a profound human unity to set against the racial segregations
being perfected in his time, he turned to the literary classics:
"I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not," he wrote in The
Souls of Black Folk (1903). You would recoil if I sat next
to you at the whites-only lunch counter, DuBois implies, but Shakespeare
doesn't when I sit and read his plays. For DuBois, culture restores
the common ground that local social arrangements deny.
The educational revolution
for which multiculturalism is a shorthand name embodies an unravelling
of this older consensus. Multiculturalism has arisen through the
spreading of the idea that the so-called universal was in fact only
partial: one side of the story pretending to be the whole story,
the interests of some groups passing themselves off as the interests
of all. "Tonto! Tonto! We are surrounded by Indians!"
the Lone Ranger said in an old joke; and like Tonto, many contemporary
readers have come to respond: "What do you mean 'we?'"
So a line like "The Odyssey exemplifies the fundamental
human desire to wander and adventure," a classroom truism not
long ago, would now provoke the quick retort: "'Human' to be
sure, if humans are assumed to be men. But what about that wife
who sat home while Odysseus got to wander?"
In recent years the
growing suspicion of alleged universals has led to a heightened
sense that there are always many parties to every human experience,
and that their experiences of the same event are often profoundly
divergent. In the wake of this realization, it has come to seem
that real education is to be found not in the move from the local
to the generalizedly "human," but in the effort to hear
and attend to all the different voices of human history—the voices
of those who have dominated the official stories, but also those
silenced or minimized by the official account. We know we are in
the neighborhood of this new plan of education whenever history
is given us in plural, contending versions: when the story of The
Odyssey is also considered from Penelope's point of view; when Columbus's
discovery of America is seen not just from the European but also
from the Arawak or Taino vantage; when the history of the Pilgrim
settlement takes into account the different history it produced
for native populations; and so on.
We have
all seen the profound educational shift that has taken place in
this country as
the second of these models has begun to displace the first in recent
years. Having been taught in the older of these ways, but lived
to teach and be reeducated in the newer one, I have had, by pure
historical coincidence, an intimate experience of this great tectonic
shift. Here I offer a few reflections on how this still-unfolding
revolution looks to a person who has seen it from both sides.
There are, in truth,
a great many things to say about this transformation. The first
and most obvious is that it embodies a playing out in education
of a contemporary social drama that ranges far beyond the sphere
of education itself. When our successors look back on the second
half of this century, the Civil Rights movement will surely strike
them as one of the most decisive developments in the history of
our time. As we know, this movement led a nation that had accepted
legal segregation to become first embarrassed by, then to seek to
reform, the practice of discrimination based on race. Having begun
with this focus, the Civil Rights movement has extended itself by
the force of analogy, creating the perception that many other forms
of social differentiation—the different treatment of women, of other
minorities, of the disabled, and so on—were as unjust and unjustifiable
as racial discrimination. The modern sentiment that men and women
should win advancement only on the grounds of individual ability,
and not because of the groups they can be lumped into, has made
for changes in college admissions, corporate hiring, professional
recruitment, and virtually every other social practice in the United
States. In the world of education, it has expressed itself as multiculturalism.
Multiculturalism embodies the ideal of equal opportunity implemented
at the level of the curriculum—the urge to open the field of study,
like other places of visibility and prestige, to women, minorities,
and others previously left out of account.
To its partisans, multicultural
education is a matter of justice done at last. But there are many
who are in sympathy with these social goals who still regard their
educational effects as pernicious. One common cry is that this movement's
political ends are leading it to abandon a long-cherished heritage
education has passed down from generation to generation. But to
this it can be replied that the history of education is a history
of change more than any of us like to admit. We all tend to share
the sense that the things we studied in school had probably been
taught there since time immemorial, and so should continue to be
taught until the end of time. But our schoolings were themselves
often products of reforms that had succeeded and then been forgotten.
What subject could seem more timeless than English? But English
wasn't thought a fit matter for university study before the 19th
century: it was a modern, vernacular literature, and education's
business was with the Classical. My own field, American literature,
entered college curricula later still, not much earlier than 1940,
having been dismissed as a mere colonial appendage of English after
English got itself academically accepted. "What . at one
time has been held in little estimation, and has hardly found place
in a course in liberal instruction, has, under other circumstances,
risen to repute, and received a proportional share of attention,"
President Jeremiah Day wrote in the Yale Report of 1828. Seen against
such a background, it may be possible to regard current curricular
revolutions as the latest chapter of a long story of change, not
an unprecedented deviance saved for modern times.
But the
central objection to multicultural reforms comes from the belief
that traditional literate culture is more meaningful
than newly promoted objects of study—that the lives and works
of the hitherto ignored, however much we may wish to feature them
for sentimental or political reasons, are less remarkable human
achievements than the classics, and their study therefore less rewarding.
(Saul Bellow meant this when he asked: "Where is the Zulu Tolstoy?")
This is a weighty charge, but to it we might reply: How could you
know that these things are less valuable except by having studied
them, extended them your sympathy, and given them your patient attention?
A silent premise of much of my education was that there were all
manner of things not worth knowing about and that we could know
they were not worth knowing without bothering to consult them. When
I came to the study of American literature, for example, I often
read that Hawthorne, Melville, and the other geniuses of the American
Renaissance wrote in opposition to a popular sentimental literature
of unimaginable banality, and—in a beautiful convenience—my
contemporaries and I understood that there was no need to read this
work in order to be confident of its perfect worthlessness. From
a later vantage I can testify that when one takes the trouble to
look into them, ignored or downvalued traditions—even the mid-19th
century sentimental novel—can turn out to contain creations of
extraordinary power and interest. (There would be no need to make
this point for our own time, when the achievements of women and
minorities are unmistakable; what contemporary literature course
would leave out such great American writers as the Asian-American
Maxine Hong Kingston, or the African American Toni Morrison, or
the Mexican-American Richard Rodriguez?) My own career in the last
15 years had led me to be increasingly engaged with writers from
outside the traditional canon. In my courses I now frequently teach
authors from hitherto ignored traditions together with their more
famous contemporaries—Frederick Douglass and Fanny Fern with Herman Melville,
Louisa May Alcott and Charles W. Chesnutt with Mark Twain. And in
my classes such writers do not just add new material, they substantially
change and enrich the terms on which every author is grasped and
understood.
In my experience then,
without causing any defection from the classic authors I still love,
teach, and value, the changes associated with multiculturalism have
brought a real renovation, a widening of the field of knowledge
and a deepened understanding of everything it contains. Yet without
in any way retracting what I have said, it seems to me possible
to wonder whether current ways of conceptualizing and implementing
multicultural education are as problem-free as some proponents imply.
If the older model of education had its limits, the new program
has a potential to enmesh us in limits of its own; and a full assessment
would want to reckon these dangers together with the advantages
it might supply.
To mention
three problems very quickly:
Multiculturalism has promoted an inclusionistic curriculum. Its
moral imperative not to discriminate leads it to want to put everything
in and leave nothing out. But there is an undeniable danger that
the practice of universal curricular representation can degenerate
into high-minded tokenism. Everyone has seen the new-style school
anthologies and curricular units with snippet samplings of all the
nation's or world's peoples. Like all official school instruments,
these show the strong sense of feeling answerable to a vigilant
cultural authority that watches their every move. The old-style
textbook paid obeisance to an imaginary censor who asked: "Are
we being sufficiently patriotic? Are we avoiding blasphemy and smut?"
The new one's choices show it similarly attentive to a moral overseer
who asks for instance: "Have we got our Native American? Our
Asian-American? Is our black a man? If so, have we also got a black
woman?"
I mean no denigration
of these groups when I say that a curriculum composed by checking
off the proper inclusion of such groups often results in tokenistic
representation, and, worse, in what I'd call "Epcotization":
the reproduction of complicated cultural experiences into so many
little manageable units, pleasurably foreign yet quickly consumable,
that we can wheel in and out of at high velocity and leave with
a complacent sense that we have now appreciated that. To my mind,
it would be not a hater but a lover of serious multiculturalism
who would feel that much contemporary multicultural education teaches
naive, presumptuous attitudes toward the cultures it intends to
honor. A week on Rudolfo Anaya's Bless
Me, Ultima or Chinua Achebe's Things
Fall Apart in the well-meaning modern classroom and the
mysteries of Chicano or African life seem to lie revealed! But I
would have thought that one of the first points we would want to
learn about other people is that their lives are not so easily known,
and that their cultures exist not to display their beauties to outsiders,
but in part to protect them against such intrusions. As the benevolent
study of other cultures gets more deeply installed in the earliest
levels of education I can imagine the objects of multicultural appreciation
rising up against their appreciators to say: "Recognize our
reality, yes, but stop thinking you can know us so easily."
Such a reply has already been heard from the Native American woman
who wrote to the New York Times to ask, in response to an
article on a California grade-school curriculum in which children
learned to perform mini-versions of tribal rituals, how they would
like it if their children were taught how to perform the crucifixion
with popsicle sticks? Zora Neale Hurston, the great novelist of
the Harlem Renaissance, wrote this warning against the presumptions
of culture-crossing in her ethnological study Mules
and Men (1936): "The theory behind our [i.e., African American]
tactics: 'The white man is always trying to know somebody else's
business. All right, I'll set something outside the door of my mind
for him to play with and handle. He can read my writing but he sho'
can't read my mind.'"
In a
parallel naivete, the "It's a Small World" or "Rainbow
Curriculum" tends to put forth an Edward Hicks model of cultural
relations, displaying
a peaceable kingdom where the lion lies down with the lamb and every
other beast. But this humane image conceals the lesson that the
relations among cultures tend quite as often to conflict as to complementarity.
I remember a colleague of mine coming back from a year in Berlin
to report how mystified European academics were by the American
desire to teach all our separate traditions in place of a unified,
common culture. In the vicinity of Eastern Europe, he said, such
a presentation would be a reminder of ethnic conflicts always threatening
to erupt into violence. This was in 1988, on the eve of the Yugoslavian
civil war.
In addition to these
potentials for naivete, a second danger of modern multiculturalism
lies in the tendency to confer a dubious absoluteness on group identities
and group labels. Some parts of American society are experiencing
a kind of romance of gender and ethnicity at present, in which an
alluring aura comes to surround an object to the extent that that
it can be found to derive from a formerly marginalized group. Through
this familiar logic, a book like Forrest Carter's The
Education of Little Tree won wide adoption as a high and
junior high school text in part because its author was understood
to be an Indian (it has since been learned that he was a white segregationist);
and even so powerful a book as Hurston's Their
Eyes Were Watching God has received a curricular exposure
out of all proportion to its interest because its author fit the
double categories Woman and Black. (For Hurston's ironic reflections
on such an abstraction or generalization of her meaning, read her
essay "How It Feels To Be Colored Me.")
To practice this kind
of extrapolation from the person to the category catches a valuable
half-truth, namely that none of us is only individual, and all of
us have had our individual lives shaped by the social positions
we have lived in. At the same time, a perpetual and unself-critical
practice of extrapolation from person to category negates the countervailing
truth—that no human group is homogeneous, and that no person has
his or her identity set solely by the groups he or she belongs to.
When we teach the habit of thinking of people as Men and Women and
Whites and Blacks we run the risk of teaching—without meaning to—that
people can be adequately identified by such generalizing labels.
But this way danger lies, for what made the multicultural revolution
necessary in the first place was the existence of a world where
qualified people could be denied places in schools because they
were blacks, or because they were women, and so on.
Last, just to the extent
that they value the enrichment it supplies, proponents of multiculturalism
will want to protect against another lurking danger: the presumption
that its contributions have a monopoly on everything important to
know. Occasionally one meets people for whom multiculturalism means
not the amplification of a knowledge now found incomplete, but the
notion that what has heretofore been ignored is valuable, and what
has hitherto been valued is pernicious, part of a conspiracy of
dehumanization and oppression. I confess that I have met products
of recent education who knew the new pan-ethnic literary canon to
perfection but who were ignorant of great traditional authors and
content to be so; people who had subtle thoughts about (for instance)
Nella Larsen's recently rediscovered novel Passing, but who
took no interest in Faulkner's nearly contemporary novel of racial
passing, Light
in August, since Faulkner was a famous misogynist.
What
is this attitude?
A new manifestation, surely, of the same presumption I mocked in
multiculturalism's more traditionalist foes, the presumption that
what I already know and like is worth knowing, and what I don't
is fit to ignore. But no educational program can contain the whole
of wisdom. Every educational model closed-mindedly embraced can
be made a home for prejudice and self-limitation, the new as much
as the old. Multiculturalism's great achievement was to teach us
that traditional literate culture did not include everything worth
knowing, and that the right corrective for its limits was to reach
outside its boundaries and learn to appreciate the different things
encountered there. But multicultural education will do itself a
favor if it remembers to apply this same lesson to itself: to be
aware of the boundaries its own enthusiasms establish, and to strive
to feel the power of things outside its ken—the works of traditional
culture not least. (And there are still plenty of world cultures
that are not registered with any detail or seriousness even in "reformed"
American education.)
The current revolution
in education has opened our eyes to many worlds of human experience
that lie outside of received accounts. In so doing, it has produced
an enormous enrichment and made school an exciting place. But what
multiculturalism is not is an all-purpose solution to the problem
of education. Like all educational programs, it has things it can
teach us, and like all programs it will enforce its inevitable limits
on us if we do not take pains to avoid them. That said, it seems
to me that the major challenge for thoughtful education now is neither
to try to prevent the multicultural revolution nor simply to help
install it in power. Rather, it is to subject this program to the
fullest possible exercise of intelligence, imagination, curiosity,
and self-criticism, so that as we add its contributions to the field
of knowledge, we maximally realize its powers of extension—and
maximally protect ourselves from its powers of limitation.  |
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